Linode Hit by DDoS Attacks

Cloud hosting company Linode has suffered a series of service interruptions due to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks launched against its infrastructure over the past few days.

The campaign started on December 26 when the company reported that DDoS attacks had disrupted the Linode Manager and its website. On the same day, the attackers also targeted Linode’s DNS infrastructure, and the company’s data centers in Dallas, Atlanta, London and Newark.

It took roughly 2-3 hours for Linode’s systems and network engineering teams and the company’s upstream providers to mitigate the attacks.

On December 27, DDoS attacks were reported at the data centers in Atlanta, Newark, and London. Linode’s service status page shows that it took the company nearly four hours to mitigate the attack against the London datacenter, while network connectivity was restored in one hour, respectively two hours, in Atlanta and Newark.

The attacks against various components of Linode’s infrastructure continued on Monday and Tuesday.

In the early hours of Wednesday, shortly after announcing that a DDoS attack affecting Linode’s website had been mitigated, the company reported seeing continued attacks disrupting access to its web services.

The latest update indicates that the Dallas data center was again targeted recently, causing packet loss.

Kaspersky Lab reported in November that in the third quarter of 2015, Linux-based botnets accounted for nearly half of the total number of DDoS attacks. The most notable was the XOR botnet, which malicious actors leveraged to launch attacks that peaked at more than 150 Gbps.

A Kaspersky report released in December showed that almost half of the organizations hit by DDoS attacks actually claimed to know the identity of the attackers. The study is based on information from more than 5,500 companies across 26 countries.

Eduard Kovacs is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.